Manually locating particular information or resources on the Internet, and in particular, the world wide web, is an often cumbersome and inaccurate task due to the vast amount of information available as well as the highly distributed and unchecked organization thereof. To assist users, search engines, directories, portals and other similar information retrieval resources, collectively referred to as “network resources,” may be provided. Network resources, such as search engines, are resources available on the Internet or other network, such as via a web page, that cache, aggregate, crawl, index, or otherwise create a directory of information available on the network, e.g. web sites, web pages, etc., and provide a method, such as a search interface/web page, by which a user may readily locate and access that information, such as by topic or key word searches or other means. The result typically includes a list of uniform resource locators (URL's), i.e. links, displayed on a web page and representative of the various web site or pages that the search engine has determined match the user's query. The list may be further augmented by advertising or paid link listings which the search engine is paid to display to the user. The user may then select one of the links to view the associated information, web page or site, the selection of which may also earn the search engine revenue, i.e. pay per click or click thru revenue.
Unfortunately, the lack of any centralized control in addition to the sheer volume of information that is available on a network, such as the Internet, coupled with limitations related to bandwidth and other resources and costs, creates a significant impediment to effective and efficient discovery and indexing of all, or even a subset, of the available information. Accordingly, in order to solve or even approach such a task, different network resources may employ different crawling/discovery, searching and/or indexing algorithms and/or methodologies and/or attempt to limit the scope, such as by topic, of the information to which they provide access.
The result is that no two network resources may return the same results for the same query and some network resources may be better suited to returning relevant results for a given search query than others. Further, the revenue generating strategies of a given search engine or other network resource, may skew the results that they provide, whether the user is aware or not, and/or augment the results with additional irrelevant content, making it more difficult for the user to locate results that they deem relevant. For the user, this necessitates executing their query across multiple network resources and manually reconciling the results thereof to sort out the relevant results and ensure that they are aware of as much of the available information relevant to their needs as possible.